Getting your event found, without becoming Eventbrite.

Events attract promoters. Promoters make events. Neither one can start without the other, and neither one shows up for a platform that doesn't already have the other. This is the shape of the problem sbTix opens with.

Eventbrite doesn't feel this pain because they solved it twenty years ago. They now sit on both sides at scale: buyers come because their friends' events are on Eventbrite, promoters come because that's where the buyers are already looking. The flywheel has been spinning since 2006. Any new ticketing platform, sbTix included, opens on the outside of that wheel.

The wrong response is to compete on software features. Every ticketing platform's dashboard does approximately the same job. Promoters do not switch platforms because the admin is slightly nicer. They switch when the new platform will visibly get their event in front of more people than the old one. That's the only feature the business runs on.

That's what this note answers. Two moves in parallel, both starting this week.

Eventbrite's real advantage is not any single feature. It's five compounding surfaces where a person looking for something to do lands on an Eventbrite URL without knowing they're on Eventbrite.

Three of those five sbTix can build in a week. The other two are the outcome of getting the first three right and doing it consistently for a year.

The plan below focuses on the buildable three, and treats the other two as the payoff we're working toward.

Two flows have to run at the same time. Neither works alone.

Push-out without pull-in gets sbTix events discovered — but on someone else's site. Fans buy the tickets, sbTix collects the fee, and no one ever visits sbtix.net again. That's Eventbrite from the promoter's side; it works, but the platform never gets its own gravity.

Pull-in without push-out builds a browse page that nobody visits, because nobody knows it exists. It's the classic new-platform failure mode: build a beautiful discovery UI and pray for organic traffic that never comes.

Both flows need to run together. Push-out earns short-term ticket sales for promoters, which keeps them on sbTix. Pull-in slowly compounds sbTix's own gravity, which is the endgame.

Five pieces went from idea to code in the last three sessions. They map to both flows above.

Every one of these lives on sbtix.net's own domain. Every one strengthens the case that sbtix.net is a place, not just a checkout page.

They are also all the raw material for Flow A. The moment we can send an editor at DoNYC or Bushwick Daily a link to sbtix.net/events.rss and a page they can eyeball at sbtix.net/trending, the pitch writes itself: "here's a live feed of nightlife events in NYC. Auto-consume it. Save your submission-form time."

The hardest truth from the distribution research: zero of the top five off-platform channels have a working public API for creating events.1 Facebook shut theirs down years ago. Google Business Profile Posts got deprecated in 2023. Instagram DMs get accounts nuked. Posh and Partiful have no public API at all.

Full automation of "post my event to Facebook + Instagram + DoNYC + Bushwick Daily + Nonsense NYC" is not on the table in 2026. What is on the table is turning a 40-minute cross-posting chore into a five-minute one.

That's the Promote tab. One dashboard surface per event, generating every asset a promoter needs to post everywhere:

Auto-generated assets, one click each

• Instagram caption — event name, date, venue, sbTix ticket URL, three hashtag suggestions based on the event's own copy.
• Instagram 4:5 post — flyer auto-cropped from the event's hero photo.
• Instagram Story 9:16 — same flyer, story-sized, with a paste-able link sticker URL.
• 3:4 flyer for text-thread sharing.
• QR code as PNG. Print it, put it in the door bin.
• A caption for TikTok — same story, native format.

Deep links that pre-fill the platforms that still let you

• Facebook Event creator — facebook.com/events/create?... pre-filled with every field. Promoter clicks the button, lands on FB with an event that's 30 seconds from publish.
• Google Business Profile Event Post deep link — same treatment, opens the GBP composer with the event details ready.
• mailto: templates for the ~10 editorial calendars — DoNYC, Nonsense NYC, Bushwick Daily, The Skint, Time Out NY, Africa Everything NYC. The promoter clicks "Send to DoNYC" and it opens their mail client with the whole pitch pre-written to that editor's known intake address.

A checklist that remembers

The Promote tab tracks which channels each event has been posted to. Promoters see gaps at a glance. sbTix as a business sees, in aggregate, which channels are worth building deeper integrations for.

Building this is not a research project — every asset above is trivial to generate server-side from data sbTix already has, and every deep link is public web infrastructure. It's a two-week build.

It is the single feature most likely to make a promoter say "sbTix helps me sell my event" rather than "sbTix collects my money." That's the difference between a ticketing tool and a growth tool.

Everything above only works if it's executed on a schedule. Distribution is not a sprint; it is a weekly obligation.

By day 30, sbTix has a live browse layer, a public feed that at least one external editor is consuming, a weekly editorial cadence, and a promoter dashboard tab that halves the effort of cross-posting. None of that is Eventbrite-scale, but all of it is the shape of the platform Eventbrite became.